Scarcity & the EU Resilience-Building Capacity in Moldova by Stabilizing the Transnistrian Conflict

Resilience-building within the EU borders is critical to ensure the security of European states. Moldova is one of the target areas for this policy due to the frozen Transnistrian conflict. The primary purpose of this article is analyzing the role of the EU in the Transnistrian conflict and why the EU resilience building activities had limited effects on the ground. The theoretical framework of this study is Mullainathan and Shafer's idea of Scarcity. Scarcity is a broad concept that means "having less than you need." The EU security scarcity has led to a security poverty. Scarcity’s capture of attention affects not only what the EU sees the world, but also the way in which it interprets and understands it. This article hypothesizes that the EU has started tunneling due to the security scarcity for resilience-building in the Transnistrian conflict, and this has led to a decrease in the bandwidth and consequently diminished the resilience-building capacity and conflict resolution in the region. The method of research is case study.